The Nuremberg Trials: Atrocities and International Law

if you uh get a doctorate in german history um it's basically your lot that you're going gonna do uh a deep dive through the history of uh of the holocaust and related uh related matters uh i those of you who who've been to some of these lectures before will remember that my grandfather was a tank commander in the second world war and then was briefly actually uh posted uh to the to the nuremberg trials in some capacity i i forget exactly what but he decided he was not really into it and the reason was that he didn't like the fact that they were trying uh admiral dernitz and admiral raider he thought that they were soldiers he didn't think the others were um he thought that if you were going to participate in having large numbers of civilian shot that you pretty much forfeited the the the designation of soldiers but he didn't like the fact that they were trying dernitz and raider so he he had himself assigned elsewhere but so i've always found the topic kind of uh kind of interesting um well okay i'm also i'm a little shocked that i got this many i'm shocked in a happy way um uh that i got this many this many people uh i find this stuff really interesting one of the things that if you i'm going to say this last thing that i'm going to start for real one of the things you'll notice if you come to a lot of these lectures is that i tend to get kind of rushed at the end and my problem is this is why i'm a terrible lecturer and probably better as a librarian that there's so many interesting sort of factlets that i know that i just can't stop myself in the course of things from stopping and being like oh there's this other interesting thing and then i look up you know and i'm 80 minutes in and i you know i was like then it finished everyone was guilty um okay so uh welcome to the third annual holocaust memorial lecture here at meadow public library um it's the 18th the holocaust remembrance day is really the 22nd which is the anniversary of the liberation of auschwitz by the red army uh i think that this is a good thing to keep having uh because the events are worth remembering uh they're important events for the 20th century one i was i was teaching at the university of washington at one point and i was a teaching assistant for this woman who was straight out of the humboldt university she was very bright but she'd never taught in an american university before and she said to me at one point she was kind of having a little trouble relating to the students and she said to me and i think this is true the difference between them and me is that i think the holocaust is the most important event of the 20th century and they don't um but it's mostly from being poorly informed um you can argue about what else might be but so before i get going uh my name is john foster i'm a librarian here at mount a public library in the adult information services department many of you have probably seen me if you frequent the library hunker down at the desk i have a doctorate in european history from the university of washington i have several other degrees and stuff although i always think to myself you know if you're going to you'll really respect what i have to say if what i turn out to say is substantial as opposed to i know a lot of kind of dopey people with doctorates but here's another weird thing if you want to talk about so there were two groups who were over-represented among sort of nazi hierarchy among the hierarchy generally austrians were statistically overrepresented i've never understood why necessarily but but among the people who ran the like especially who were involved in the holocaust people with doctorates were statistically overrepresented i don't know why that is uh i certainly don't think of that as a reason not to pursue higher education but uh but there are plenty i mean it's colton bruno who's not in this picture but uh but who was one of the worst people tried in this particular trial uh had a phd i think it was a legal phd or something like that fairly early in the second world war the the allies or the group of states that come to be allies started talking about what it is exactly whoops that they would do uh when they when the war was over and they were victorious and they pretty much assumed especially starting in december 1941 that they were going to win i mean churchill was pretty was pretty clear after the united states entered the war after pearl harbor that in the long run the allied cause was going to be victorious there was no way that germany and japan even italy less of a consideration by their lights but could stand up against the industrial might of the united states and great britain and the soviet union working together so they started sort of talking about what it was that they were going to do uh and in the beginning the uh their ideas about what they were going to do were fairly bloodthirsty uh the british uh cabinet discussed it and the most commonly expressed idea was that uh uh the nazi leadership should be summarily executed to the extent that any of them could be caught um but over the course of the next several years uh and for a number of reasons that we'll sort of discuss as things go on they eventually kind of developed a kind of a more moderated position on what they were going to do that was essentially connected with the kind of world that they wanted to build after the war i mean for a long time they didn't really want to talk about they were so sort of caught up with the idea of what are we going to do to win the war that they didn't really want to talk very much about what sort of a world might might turn out to arise after the end of the war but once they did it became clear to them fairly quickly that uh what was needed was something that was going to avoid a repeat of what had happened after the first world war the trial opened actually on the 20th of november this is the first day and this is uh richard h jackson the chief prosecutor correct an associate justice of the u.s supreme court delivering the opening statement the plans started as early as december 1941 you can tell that it's not coincidental that the british cabinet was discussing in december 1941 uh what was going to happen because it had become clear to them that now there was a good chance that they were going to win up until that point and particularly those of you who who who listen to me talk about churchill will recall uh the the british really felt like they were treading water uh but once we were in the war they knew that in the long run uh the allied side was gonna be was gonna win um there's a really interesting moment this is this is talked about extensively in uh william manchester's biography of of churchill the third volume of of which uh is uh just discusses what happened at the tehran conference so at the tehran conference in november december 1943 there was a sort of dinner party late at night uh and churchill roosevelt stalin molotov a bunch of other people were there and they were kind of talking about what they should do about the nazi leadership and uh stalin said well i think probably what needs to happen is for us to shoot 50 or 100 000 german officers and um churchill said well i i think that's excessive don't you i mean i think that that's i think that's a little much and then roosevelt chimed in roosevelt was in this weird period at this point where he was kind of ganging up with stalin on churchill he liked to kind of tease churchill in a way that was a little unfortunate he didn't like colonialism and he also thought that he could charm stalin about which he was sadly incorrect i mean weirdly enough churchill really understood stalin far better than roosevelt ever did churchill knew that you couldn't trust stalin any farther than you could throw him in terms of what he said but once you knew what he wanted you could tell with certainty what he was going to do i mean this is a great thing about and churchill stalin could also be kind of friendly in a weird way i mean it's hard to say that about a guy who's responsible for you know the 20 or 30 million murders but um so anyway roosevelt kind of chimes in sort of jokingly well we can just shoot 49 000 instead and um churchill became kind of incensed and he said you know i just think this is completely barbaric and really if if this is the if this is the uh path that you insist on taking i prefer to be taken out in the garden and shot right now and he stormed out and uh he went into another room and he was sort of standing around kind of collecting himself and he felt a hand on his shoulder and here's stalin with molotov behind him he said look you know we were just kind of joking about that which is a you know stalin is the kind of person who would and in fact had have fifty or thousand fifty or a hundred thousand people shot so when he joked about it it was a little macabre you know it was not the kind of thing you could just sort of brush off uh but churchill got over it went back to the party so discussions of it sort of uh percolated among the allied governments through 1944 and what eventually ended up happening was that uh it was it was decided that what needed to happen was uh that the uh there were still some people who were very much in favor of just summary execution but what the government's decided was that what they wanted to have happen was for these people to be exposed to some sort of um legitimate so to speak legal process so that a difference could be established between the sorts of processes and rules that they were being exposed to as opposed to the sort of uh illegal uh way that they had been conducting themselves toward their own people uh and also toward the the uh the peoples in europe that they had that they had seized power over so the question was uh what sort of law was this going to be now there had been for about a century uh discussions of for a long time the sort of idea about war was war is a sort of law unto itself and whatever happens in war that's what happens i mean if you look at the history of the 30 years war in the between 1618 and 1648 in germany uh there was pretty much anyone was fair game and a fairly large portion of the population of central europe was killed so it wasn't until the sort of middle of the 19th century uh but i should say in the middle of the 19th century people started thinking more seriously about what the laws of of war should be um it had happened in the in the 18th century particularly war had been very professional and armies had done a relatively good job of keeping uh war to a sort of conflict between sort of professional groups uh the french revolution changed this to a great extent because uh what you get is the sort of levial mass like the large large groups of the population being brought into the army i mean one of the differences between the prussian army and the nepal and the the french revolutionary armies was that the prussian army you know the theory of the prussian army was the soldiers should be more afraid of their officers than they are of the enemy and that uh for this reason the the prussians the officers had to be fairly close to the troops all the time uh french revolutionary armies because they were much more sort of nationalistic motivated by a kind of internal concern for the nation could operate out of sight of the generals more effectively um that's nationalism and war is another it's another story um but starting in the 18 uh 50s and 60s people started sort of codifying what could go on war and the the major figure here is a guy named franz lieber who was born in berlin in 1798 he fought in the battle of waterloo uh he also then fought as a sort of mercenary in the greek civil war in the 1820s he then moved to boston where he got a job running a gymnasium and not like the educational kind i mean like a swimming club but he worked as a translator he worked on uh encyclopedic projects and he worked as an educator and eventually he uh became professor of history and political economics at south carolina college now the university of south carolina he had three sons when the civil war broke out one of them joined the south and the other two joined the north uh he himself was a strong supporter of the union uh moved to new york uh worked for an entity called the uh loyal publication society which was essentially a kind of uh publicity arm of the us government putting out uh pro-union uh materials and uh he did he did sort of what we might these days call propaganda work with the war department and in this context uh he was asked by the war department by lincoln to develop a code for battlefield conduct uh in the course of late 1862 and 1863. now the the time that this happens is important and and the reason why and you'll notice say who's commissioned by the lincoln administration the race of enemy combatants cannot be consideration and this is key and the reason is because this was done sort of in concert with the issuing of the emancipation proclamation the south had said that they were going to treat black soldiers as criminals and the north said well no you know we're going to have their soldiers just like anyone else you have to you have to treat them that way they didn't really ascend to this unfortunately but um also that uh interestingly ethical treatment of local inhabitants uh this when sherman marched through georgia and the carolinas rather went by the wayside um quarter must be offered to the enemy this was mostly honored you know you very rarely in the civil war got those sort of no quarter asked none given type of situations uh but it said that if people were spies or partisans sorry that this is so low but i always forget that this thing is uh that they could be summarily executed without trial in the late 19th century as as tensions began to rise in in europe uh a number of european states decided that they wanted to take on some of the ideas that the libra code uh had had propounded and you'll notice i put a few little bits of it here and and the the point really is that a lot of what was in the libra code is also in the hague convention 1907 including humane treatment of of uh humane treatment of prisoners you can't despoil prisoners of their belongings uh this is too small to read and i'm not going to read all of it i just put it up there as a kind of mnemonic for myself um you're allowed to have prisoners do work as long as it's not too onerous uh they have to be paid if you're gonna if you're gonna have them labor um the wages of prisoners shall go to improving their position and the balance shall be paid to them at the time of their release i strongly doubt that any prisoner of war at any point was paid money at the point of his release but we'll just leave that at that these this is tiny um but i'm just going to go through some of these no poison no poison weaponry no killing people who've laid down their arms no declarations of no quarter uh no using munitions that would cause superfluous injury like you're only allowed to kill people you can't purposely maim them i guesses um you can't use make improper use of a flag of truce um you can't destroy the enemy's property uh unless you have to that was fairly liberally interpreted during the first world war you can't compel people to fight against their own side uh any pressure on the population of occupied territory to take the oath to sort of join up the other side as prohibited uh private property cannot be confiscated these these are all sort of ideals right that that if you know much about war in the 20th century were uh fairly consistently ignored um pillage is formally prohibited i mean this is what soldiers do i mean like let's if you just look at the long history of warfare part of the kind of payback for putting your life on the line is you know and a little light pillaging here and there is probably all right um i mean who am i to say no and this in fact so when it turned out that uh as the red army uh uh advanced to the eastern part of germany at the end of the second world war and committed several hundred thousand acts of rape and uh sundry other acts of violence uh the german communist party represented the german communist party went to stalin and said um maybe you should bring these people in and stalin said no um these these guys have had a long hard fight and they're gonna take some the fruits of their victory if you will um so uh there's a sort of recognition that that part of the kind of compensation if you want to if you want to refer to it that way of being a soldier is is uh at least some of these things if not all of them so at the end of the first world war uh the allied powers the on taunt powers wanted to have trials for people uh that they viewed uh as having been war criminals on the german side pretty much exclusively and so this was at a time uh in the in the wake of the treaty of versailles where the germans had essentially been compelled to sign uh articles 227 through 230 which essentially uh forced them to concede that they were solely responsible for the war they're called the war guilt clauses and this was a matter of real upset in germany and in fact uh i i think it's pretty fair to say an injustice i think if you read christopher clark's book the sleepwalkers which is about the outbreak of the first world war what you'll find is that uh there were a lot of people uh there was a lot of blame to go around and i mean certainly it was the the germans who violated the belgian frontier to start out with but the french had been had been engaging in these hinky arms deals with the serbians for a long time lots of people were doing lots of things so um there was a kind of feeling and you know those of you who who remember my excuse me talk about the origins of national socialism will recall that the you know the german people had been kind of told for a long time that they were winning and then it turned out in fairly short order that they were losing um and they were looking around for people to blame right you know and people like hitler said well it's the jews and it's the communists who stabbed you in the back but the the treaty of versailles was a real thorn in in the side of the german conscience consciousness at that time they really wanted to try the kaiser but the kaiser had abdicated and gone to holland and the dutch said that they wouldn't give him up uh and not wanting to kind of get into a big hassle over they said well okay we'll let the germans try these people right we'll have these trials they had them in in leipzig uh and the the anton powers submitted a list of 900 names of people that they wanted tried the germans tried 12 of them sentenced them to terms ranging from nothing to four years and then almost promptly and amnestied most of them and these were people who were you know pretty obviously guilty of i mean these were mostly low-level people that they tried people who had been guilty of shooting civilians or what have you and the the germans were just completely uninterested in in trying them and the lesson that a lot of the sort of uh people in the anton powers drew was well you just can't have them do it right i mean we're going to have to have some accountability and it can't be the germans can't be the the losing side doing it so starting in uh the fall of 1943 the allies start trying to kind of establish a basis on which this trial is going to happen and um there's a couple of fairly obvious problems those of you more legal cast of mind will immediately think to yourself well what was illegal about what these people did right i mean so there's the question of ex post facto which is a a principle well established in american law which is that you cannot hold somebody responsible for an act that was not illegal at the time that they did it so you can't someone does act a later on you decide that that's bad and make a law against it and then prosecute that person it wasn't illegal at the time you can't prosecute someone for it and a lot of people said a lot of the defendants said well look none of what we did was what law did we break right um also uh there was the question of uh how can you have what is the basis of international law i mean so law requires a kind of some sort of sovereignty right so we can have law in the united states because whatever else you think about most of you probably think about the government there's there's legitimate sovereignty in the country so uh there's a kind of authority that's um that's neutral vis-a-vis people and can uh and can sort of apply the law in a balanced way but in the international arena there isn't that sort of sovereign power i mean some people say well god is a sovereign power and if everyone worships the same one that might be a viable premise but it's not sadly so what you get is a sort of series of uh kind of letters of intent starting in uh october of 1943 and essentially the idea is uh we're going to apply uh sort of customary laws of war uh and there was a lot of debate internally among the among the allied powers about what this was going to actually involve right because uh if it's not i mean lawyers like to have very discreet precedent written out before they do something so that they they have a text referred to um but what essentially was decided was that they were going to first of all they were going to apply if you had signed up to international agreements so one of the things they said was germany was a party to the hague conventions so to the extent that they violated the hague conventions that's against that's against the law and then they said well uh there are sort of generally accepted rules for how soldiers conduct themselves you cannot go around just randomly shooting civilians much less systematically going around trying to extirpate populations as a whole so the idea that they came around to eventually was that uh they were going to charge the the uh defendants with a series of four uh crimes uh participation in a common plan or conspiracy for the accomplishment of a crime against peace planning initiating and waging wars of aggression and other crimes against peace war crimes crimes against humanity so you can kind of see uh this is sort of this they wanted to kind of sweep up all the people who'd been part of the sort of nazi hierarchy before the war so they were kind of setting the groundwork right and then uh this is for the sort of uh military people involved in planning like the invasion of the soviet union right so they need something that's going to explicitly get to that war crimes is a fairly uh uh it's it's one of those things you know you kind of revert to potter stewart uh i you know i may not be able to define it but i know it when i see it um war crimes especially uh shooting people who've surrendered mistreatment of prisoners uh shooting civilians despoiling civilians and then crimes against humanity was the sort of idea that they came up with to try and encompass the the crimes specifically relating to the holocaust which were by their lights kind of had not really been seen before in the modern world this is not exactly true um the uh various colonial powers had engaged in things that would fall under this case especially germany in the case of the nama and the herrero people in southwest africa uh also the turks and the armenian genocide that's a very fraught topic right now and the turkish government does not concede that that's what it was scholars generally do uh view that that was the case um but uh hitler himself said who now remembers the armenians uh and this was part of his sort of justification for undertaking the the attempt to get rid of all the the jews in the world as far as he was concerned uh the leader of the american delegation was robert h jackson at this point he was the he was an associate justice on the u.s supreme court he had no formal legal training after he went to college he excuse me he did not go to college he worked after high school he worked in his uncle's law firm achieved his legal training then at that point college degree was not required to uh to be a member of the bar uh he became associated with the roosevelt faction state of new york uh after roosevelt was uh elected he eventually became the solicitor general uh i had was not i was unaware until i read telford taylor's book about this what the solicitor general is uh it's the the government's lawyer for arguing in front of the supreme court uh he had an incredible win record in front of the supreme court such that louis brandeis said that that robert jackson should be the solicitor general for the rest of his life um eventually he was then u.s attorney general 1940 and 41 and then was uh appointed to the supreme court in 1941 served in 1954. jackson was a really interesting guy he was very passionately committed to the cause of seeing justice done against nazi war criminals but he was not really that committed to the idea of the international military tribunal what he pretty clearly wanted there's a really great book i wish i had brought it with me i have it upstairs and which i'll put it back into circulation when i'm done here written by telford taylor who we'll get to in a minute here um and taylor was pretty much of the opinion that uh jackson at times wanted to kind of sabotage the negotiation with the other three powers so that they could just we could just stage zonal trials you know at that point germany was broken up or in the process of being broken up into four zones of occupation and what jackson really wanted to do was to have trials in the individual zones in which whoever had whichever war criminal could try them there um uh eventually he was he was dissuaded from this part of the reason was that jackson really did not like the russians uh didn't trust them uh and was afraid that they were gonna sort of turn that i mean he knew what had gone on in the show trials in the 30s and he didn't want this to get turned into another sort of like you know he wanted to be a real trial i mean he thought he said over and over there's really no point in doing this if it's just going to be a you know a sort of formality on the way to the execution chamber so he really uh it was only sort of with great uh effort that he was sort of prevailed upon to um to have the sort of full international uh trial with all the allied powers participating now interesting thing which i i thought to mention earlier is that uh so the the four powers the russians the soviets us the french and the british were kind of trying to decide how they were going to go about this legally and one thing there's another thing which i did not know until i read telford taylor's book uh that uh the european law at that point didn't have the concept of conspiracy uh but that's a that's a pretty uh common principle in u.s law so if you conspire to commit a crime that in itself is a crime even if you don't then manage to commit the crime later on conspiring to break the law is also against the law and uh the europeans thought this was really weird because really they thought that you shouldn't you know the law is the law if you break the law i mean in a sort of uh european style trial everybody knows all the evidence beforehand and then there's a kind of discussion about it and then you render a judgment you don't get this sort of like adversarial uh discovery driven process that we have in u.s courts so there was a real sort of a lot of what went on in the negotiations in 1944 was an attempt to find a way that the american european and soviet uh legal systems could work together i mean the soviet legal system such as it was um soviet legal system was very efficient um if sometimes you know i hear people talk about how like we want you know the greatest efficiency and i think to myself sometimes efficiency is not in and of itself a virtue um so uh there were a number of uh problems that had to be sorted out and and telford taylor uh who was who was jackson's assistant uh and the associate prosecutor was uh uh responsible for a lot of the organization of how it was done now what had to be done was they had to find a lot of evidence they had to find a lot of documents and they had to get the documents translated into languages that everybody understood so to get back to the question someone was raising earlier they had to also organize a trans like simultaneous translation which we have a lot of facilities for now but didn't then and at one point somebody was saying to me my wife probably are you going to play any footage from the trial and i decided not to and the reason is because it's all very slow and they talk and stop very slowly because they had to wait for the translation to happen and they wanted to talk very clearly so it's very stilted and it's kind of it kind of uh detracts from the the the power i mean there's a moment where uh they have uh eric von den boxalevsky who was an ss over uber grip and fuhrer which is kind of a general talking about and one of the most blood-soaked of the nazi criminals uh who was not on trial here he was just giving evidence got in the courtroom rebecca west who was covering the whole thing for the new yorker described him as seeming like a kind of stalled and very serious insurance broker and he just described in fairly straightforward terms how they had killed 90 000 people by shooting in the soviet union in his little part of it uh and it was pretty stunning to the courtroom because you know when you hear someone talk about the sort of like murder the old-fashioned way of 90 000 human beings from babes in arms up to people you know at the end of their lives of great age that's a very stunning sort of thing and he just sort of talked about it you know pretty straightforward terms but the trial was full of things like that i mean it was really one of the real victories of the trial was effectively presenting what had gone on and why it was necessary that that these people be tried in this way but jackson and and and taylor as well were really adamant that it had to be the charges had to be proved right that it had to be there had to be it had to be possible that someone could be innocent that someone could be acquitted by this trial maybe not innocent but you know what i'm saying uh taylor had gone into the army he was a lawyer he'd gone into the army as a major he represented us intelligence at bletchley park and code breaking british code breaking operation at bletchley park uh he was promoted to colonel in 1944 and assigned to be jackson's assistant um he led the prosecution of the high command case so they were um when they discussed it there was sort of extensive discussion about who it was they were going to try and they wanted to try a bunch of people they wanted to make it sort of extensive thing this is the international military so you'll see this referred to as the imt and then later on there were sort of the steps what we call the subsequent nuremberg trials or the uh the subsequent nmts the nuremberg military tribunals we'll talk about that a little later on but they wanted to make sure that they tried not just the german government people but the high command too this was a matter of this was something about which there was a lot of debate because the you know the question is well are these people soldiers and if they're soldiers don't they have to just do what the civilian government says um but it had been established in the hey convention that you really can't uh obedience to uh an order that causes you to violate accepted laws of war is not obligatory even though most of these guys i mean so when these when the when the people on trial gave their kind of explanations the most often heard one and if you look at the sort of large scope of these war crimes trials it's always well i was ordered to do it no one ever suffered any consequences for not for saying no by the way but so they wanted to um make sure that they got the high command and taylor was was involved in uh that was his sort of sub group so they wanted to get the remaining nazi leadership particularly hermann goering who is the the uh the senior leading nazi to be captured uh martin borman who had been sort of hitler's uh uh real really hitler's favorite borman was nowhere to be found and later it turned out that he had he and three other four or five other ss guys had fled the bunker after hitler shot himself and had uh gotten themselves shot by the or killed in an artillery attack by the red army trying to cross the spray on the friedrichstrasse bridge they wanted to get the political associates uh von poppin constantine von neugra uh on reuben trop who had negotiated the was the foreign minister negotiated the nazi soviet pact and they wanted to get economic and business leaders this was a big thing jackson was really up on this like we want so the business leaders had facilitated this the nazi program and you know you'll hear a lot of times people say well the nazis like got rid of all the property rights and the you know and this is not true industrialists did fine under the nazis it wasn't like there was the nazis only really national literally like one business and that was the junkers aircraft manufacturer now they told you what you had to make and how much but they also paid you for it and the industrialists made a lot of money um um yeah so they were not the industrials were not fleeing germany under the nazis the jewish ones were but the but not the not the non-jewish ones um so they were looking especially for um so there's an interesting thing about crook some of you will know it was the great german arms manufacturer and um they uh kept wanting to find uh the head of krupp um and so there was the kind of older head of krupp and there was uh there was uh the younger alfred his his son who had mostly been running things and there was a kind of misunderstanding about who was meant the the jackson really wanted to try the older one because he had truly been in charge but he was he was dying essentially and so there's a kind of back and forth in which people are saying that there's a kind of like yeah you mean like so-and-so like yeah you mean alfred yeah so-and-so yeah alfred they kept like and it wasn't until kind of they got to the trout they realized that neither one of them had really agreed on which crop they were going to try and so it turned out that they formally tried the father but he was sort of released from the trial about halfway through because he was not compos mentis at the time and it was viewed as a real victory for alfred krupp alfred son because he was going to have some serious explaining to do now unfortunately for him they later on had another trial that he got hooked up in and um but he in the long run came out okay we'll talk about that um they would have liked to try hitler of course hitler had committed suicide in april of 1945. uh they would have liked to try heinrich himmler the head of the the ss he had committed suicide in uh british custody in may of 1945. they wanted to try uh heinrich mueller otherwise known as gestapo muller mueller disappeared and nobody knows what happened to him hopefully nothing good but they want to try adolf aishman aishman by this time was in hiding and then managed to hide out in south america until 15 or so years later when the mossad caught up with him uh and they wanted to try martin bormann who uh nobody at this point knew was dead but but was so these are the defendants hermann goering the head of the luftwaffe and also hitler's sort of second in command rudolf hess who had flown famously to england hess i loved the description of him from manchester's book he was sort of distinguished by his fanatical loyal to loyalty to hitler and his brutish stupidity um mormon who they indicted because they didn't know where he was uh albert spare uh kunstein van noyer these are government officials franzan poppin joachim von um sometimes you can't tell the nazis without a scorecard so i have to um let's see uh robot lie who was the uh head of the uh the nazi labor organizations alfred rosenberg who was their sort of um uh cheap propagandist but then later uh uh chief sort of intellectual propagandist goebbels described alfred rosenberg wrote this book called the myth of the 20th century which is a sort of like kind of more intellectual version of mein kampf and uh which goebbels described as an intellectual belch um uh he later became rosenberg later became uh the minister of the eastern occupied territories uh hans frank who had been the governor general of the of poland uh balder vanshirak who was the head of the um the hitler youth and who had been involved in the commando operation that liberated mussolini when he was imprisoned uh yodel who is the head of the obercommando de vermont uh wilhelm keitel uh also part of the oprah commando carl dernitz and eric rader who were eric raider was the head of the german navy uh dernitz was the head of the submarine service and then later head of the navy uh fritz zalkel who is the gal lighter gaul lighter is a sort of nazi governor of thuringia uh auto seis einkor inquired excuse me who is the head of the the gal lighter of vienna uh aaron's cult runner who is a uh i have to remember his exact position probably the worst of the guys uh uh the head of the uh rex circle heights aunt or the the reich security head office of the ss uh julia streicher the editor of der sturmer an unbelievably vile anti-semitic newspaper i mean it was so vile that in 1940 uh hitler banned its publication and really you've got to be somewhat impressed by this right because if you've written anti-semitic garbage that is so vile that hitler thinks you've crossed a line and you've really accomplished something something horrible but something uh walter funk who was the head of the uh kyomar shocked was the head of the rice bank hammershot was a really bright guy he had some very crackpot ideas uh walter funk uh was the head of the reich's bank after shock friction was a hans richard was a broadcaster who was a sort of propagandist whose voice sounded a lot like goebbels so he got a job doing radio broadcast that goebbels didn't want to do um i'll bet spare um so uh the americans got to do uh nazi organizations conspiracy crimes against peace the british were responsible for treaty violations violations like of the hague conventions and crimes on the high seas the french did uh crimes against humanity in the west and the soviets did crimes against humanity in the east i don't know why that cut off east but there you go um there's an interesting thing about uh the sort of crimes in the high schools so the british were it was mostly sort of involved with the kind of submarine warfare from which the british had suffered very badly but it turned out that dearness and raider had really and the german navy had mostly obeyed the laws of war there were a couple of cases where they had shot semen escaping from a sinking ship but the british had done that too it turned out now the allies decided very early on that they were going to not accept uh what illegal parliaments refer to as a tuquoque defense do you know what that is you did it too um so the the the you know what they didn't want was the germans saying well you know you firebombed hamburg you firebombed dresden you you know explicitly targeted german civilians which we did um there's no two ways about it uh the fact of the matter is if i go out and commit a murder it doesn't make any difference if someone else commits a murder too like i'm still guilty of committing the murder so it doesn't make me less guilty the question of like whether the other person should be whatever that is another is another issue but they so the the british really came to the conclusion that so dearness and raider were guilty of the sort of conspiracy piece right because the war itself was illegal but as far as what the german navy had done uh in the conduct of their war on the sea that was pretty much just par for the course i mean the british had with pretty much no warning sunk the french fleet uh in the in the mediterranean uh so the the british you know i think we're willing to be a little flexible uh or at least recognize that that uh radar and donuts hadn't grossly violated hadn't grossly deviated from what was normally acceptable um so before i get to this point i will just say that so a lot of the trial was very slow very long presentations of evidence i mean they really made a point of uh you know jackson was very adamant we want to make sure that these people that it's clear to everyone that these people are guilty right that this is not a case of the victors just imposing justice on a on a defeated under-defeated people because it has to be once again what we're trying to do is create uh this is sort of around the time of the formation of the united nations a kind of re-attempt at the sort of organization that the uh that the league of nations had had failed at being sort of uh a way of enforcing civilized standards around the world and so what they wanted to do was to establish a principle wherein uh it was possible to have a trial that was not just a kind of drum head affair um so and in fact there were three acquittals uh shocked uh i think quite justifiably was acquitted because i mean he was kind of a nut but he wasn't he hadn't done anything uh unlike funk his successor funk there's a really interesting moment that telford taylor describes when uh you know funko had just said you know i was running the rice bank i was involved in this and that the other thing and it was you know i didn't really i wasn't involved in any of the sort of awful stuff and then in the middle of his testimony documents were presented that showed that he had known that they were taking in all kinds of materials being sent from the concentration camps and that he had known exactly where they came from and exactly under what circumstances they were taken and funk apparently just completely freaked on them he was just like oh my god like suddenly realized that he was in a lot of trouble because he you know uh because his defense like i didn't know what was you know i was just a sort of cog in the machine was was going down the drain um and friction friction really hadn't you know friction was just a sort of propagandist he was a kind of low-level guy who got swept up into things above his head hess uh hess was really mentally ill uh and he said that hess was an interesting case because he said as he was sort of being interrogated i know i must have been involved in these things and if you say that i was i believe you but i just don't remember and the psychiatrists who examined him said that they thought that that was probably true um hess was incarcerated in spandau prison in the area of berlin where he subsequently much later committed suicide in 1987. there were 12 death sentences borman was sentenced to death in absentia uh the sentence had already been carried out by the red army uh hans frank well justifiably sentenced to death since he had been involved in the clearing of all the jews out of the general government of poland i.e he had been involved in more than a million murders uh most of the high command including well the two main guys yodel and kaidel were both sentenced to death for planning and undertaking the the war in the east which was illegal and they also said uh involved significant war crimes and it basically you know let it be known that uh the under the guise of hunting partisans that the the vermont was was to be uh was allowed to just shoot anybody that they wanted and i mean this is one of the sort of interesting things about this that for a long time in germany there was a sort of idea well it was the ss that did all these killings there was actually a book that was called the ss alibi of a nation um and it wasn't until the 90s there was a book that came out and i cannot remember for life me the author we have it here uh but essentially the book sort of showed that um the vermont had been extensively involved in partisan hunting partisan hunting is like sort of like code word for uh shooting non-soldiers um uh and that and that the like the the vermont had been very much involved in the process too so there was no like there was a sort of commonly said thing commonly sort of asserted premise especially among people on the right in germany like the honor of the the vermont was intact but and it really wasn't i mean they had been involved in a lot of in a lot of uh uh in a lot of murders not to put too fine a point on it yes how did the two enable dernitz was sentenced to 10 years i believe raider was i believe that that's what raider was saying let me just look oh raider got life um but uh both of them if i'm not mistaken hold on yeah uh so yeah they got long sentences and but partly it was because they were involved in the plan it was in because of their role in the planning not because of what went on so much at sea um where are we here okay i'm doing all right uh slice inkvart uh sethinkhart was apparently a pretty jovial guy for a guy who was on trial for his life uh he was sort of constantly sort of telling viennese jokes and um but he had been the gal lighter of vienna and had sent a lot of people to their deaths in concentration camps colton bruner basically got what he had coming um colton bruner was described by rebecca west as looking like an extremely brutal horse uh he's just colton brenner really looks the part i mean it's too bad you can't quite see where's called bruno right here he has bad like scarring on his face and he really just you can imagine him like like calling out the firing squad um the one thing that i think is a little weird and and and pardon me if i say this got sentenced to death striker was a really awful human being i mean let's let's i i don't want to i don't want to i don't want to excuse him in any way that if you ever have the misfortune to read issues of deshtirma it is one of the most vile things ever put on paper so when i say that if i say something that sounds like i you know that he got maybe not exactly justice it's not because i don't think he deserved to be punished he was really a wretched human being and pretty stupid too i mean if you look i have like the iq scores of all them and he was he was like routinely he was widely recognized as the dumbest one um but probably i don't know that he should have been hanged now having said that so they uh the executions were carried out on the 16th of october uh in the gymnasium at the palace of justice in nuremberg uh it was all done by hanging they were brought in one by one they used a short drop uh so that in a couple of cases uh soldiers had to go into the compartment behind and pull on them until they died like it didn't break their necks um some of them expressed remorse von ribentrop said expressed remorse particularly striker his last does anyone remember what his last words were this is how i celebrate purim 1946. purim is a jewish holiday yes one day the bolsheviks will catch you all um so well it's not like a tragedy that he got hanged i'm just saying um after this after the end of the imt jackson stepped down he had wanted to go home for a long time and taylor taylor was promoted to brigadier general in order to run this don't feel like you have to read all this i'm going to tell you what it says but um telford taylor was promoted to brigadier general because they wanted to have someone at a general officer level to run the whole thing they had a series of 12 more trials afterwards people i was sort of you know people people center on the the main one of the higher-ups but they then had a trial for the uh the a number of the nazi doctors who had been involved in the t4 program the t4 program was this quote-unquote euthanasia of uh of mentally disabled people mentally and physically disabled people they trialled the luftwaffe general evan milch evan milk they tried nazi judges uh they tried uh oswald pull separately and with 17 other ss officers paul was a higher ss officer and involved in the einsatzgruppen they tried friedrich flick who was an industrialist they had a trial centering on the ige farben industrial concern ek farben so interestingly so auschwitz is a sort of interesting institution in the sense that it was a killing factory in the same way as uh maidonk or sobibor treblinka or belzek but it was also an industrial had a gigantic uh synthetic rubber plant at auschwitz 3 that was run by ige farben um trout for the shooting of hostages trial for the higher ss officers for uh this is the ru sha is the office of race and resettlement so these are the people involved in like um racially cleansing areas of russia so that they could resettle germans there ethnic germans so to speak the einsatzgruppen trial where they tried the leaders of a lot of the the uh the einstein's group including paul bloble and uh and soundcooler and a bunch of people who really deserve to be executed um crook the that are trial of crook so what you'll notice with these so in the crook trial the flick trial farben trial uh people were imprisoned and then stripped of their property but there was an amnesty in 1951 and almost all of them got it all back and a large proportion of the people who were doing time uh were released either in 1951 at the amnesty they had then or in 1956 and in subsequent embassy and in fact 1956 they also passed a law saying that uh if you had been a civil servant but had lost your civil servant pension because of having been involved with the nazis you got your pension back um yeah so uh these was the the einsatzgruppen trial particularly resulted in a number of death sentences most of which were carried out but by the turn of the decade conditions had really changed in germany as early as 1943 the allied governments had got it into their head and by the allies i mean us and the british that the real problem was russia was the soviets and uh it made nazis look a little better who was more anti-communist right than a nazi um and as a matter of fact those of you familiar with operation paperclip will know but the us government systematically grabbed up all the nazi scientists that it could get including a former ss major vera von braun and another guy who i i can never remember his name when it comes to i need to write it down there's a guy he did there's a building he was the sort of father of uh of high altitude medical research and there's a building named after him in maryland somewhere and he got he sort of cut his teeth doing experiments on people in dachau um so uh it became clear that west germany particularly was going to be our ally so i was talking about this with somebody else recently stalin didn't want east germany when the east german state was founded he was so annoyed at the east german communist leaders he thought they were idiots and and the reason was what he wanted was germany unified in neutral because he was pretty convinced that the west would want to invade the soviet union pretty soon they had been invaded the russia and then the soviet union had been invaded twice in the 20th century he knew that the uh united states the british the western powers had a pretty negative attitude toward communism and toward the soviet union so what he wanted to do was create a series of buffer states this is really you know stalin and his people didn't you know they thought that communism would eventually spread everywhere because it was the rational system but they wanted it what they wanted in east germany like the taking sort of power in east germany was not so much about spreading communism because they thought that was going to happen anyway what they wanted was a buffer so that they wouldn't get invaded immediately and i'm not saying this to justify things that the stalinist did in eastern europe because what they did was brutal and repugnant but you have to understand what the reasons for it were so he was really annoyed because what then happened when you know like the allies then got to form the other three parts of germany into uh the west german state which is much bigger and into which they poured large amounts of money through the marshall plan i mean east germany was a lot of it was de-industrialized because the soviets came in there the red army came in there and dismantled all the factories and took them back to soviet union but so as as adenauer's government sort of goes along in west germany we're sort of like getting he did a very good job of cultivating us particularly you know he made it clear like i want western style democracy in germany and the he and and representatives of the churches especially the evangelical lutheran church started undertaking uh efforts to kind of get clemency for people who'd been sentenced to death and i looked for but because i was in a hurry couldn't find there's a really great book about this by name norbert frey which i can order for anyone who is interested that there's plenty of copies in the system not here but around um in which the the the the head of the evangelical lutheran church made this wrote this letter and i think was to john mccloy the head of the allied military government who said you know in the name of christian charity we think you should offer clemency to the i think the person under consideration at this point was paul bloble who had been an einsatz commando leader and was responsible for 20 or 30 40 000 murders and mccloy whoever it was wrote this letter back which was like well look you know i'm as much for christian charity as the next guy but like this guy is a category one war criminal so like we're going to execute him like there's no like now you might want to sort of i'd be open to hearing sort of suggestions about other people down the line but this you know you can't you're not going to get anywhere by trying to get clemency of these people who murdered thousands and thousands of people now having said that eventually a lot of these guys were amnesty there's a fairly small number of people who ended up serving long prison terms and part of the problem was that part of the sort of background of this was what was called denotification so um the the allied military government came in and said there's sort of like five categories of people category five who are who are unburdened at last at a category four who were sort of fellow travelers if you will category three uh they got some restrictions but no internment category two who are activists they could get jail and then category one who are the top level offenders but even after you know after 1951 most of the people who'd been put in jail for this between 1951 1956 ended up getting out so what they were trying to do what the allied government was trying to do governments were trying to do what the occupation governments were trying to do was kind of extirpate nazism and the the imt the international military tribunal was a key part of that right because what they wanted to do was show nazism was an illegal criminal enterprise i mean this was this was the basis on which a lot of former members of the ss were prosecuted not because they knew that not because it was could be shown that they individually had done act x y or z but because the whole ss was a criminal enterprise um so this i put this in because who doesn't love exploding swastikas um this is a a little bit of footage of them blowing the swastika off the uh the yeah the nuremburg uh the assembly ground at nuremberg where they'd had the party rallies in the 1930s um yeah there's just something really beautiful about that um but you'll notice uh so what you have here is the german eagle and it's had the swastika uh knocked off and i wish i could have i was looking around i had still have i used to live in charlottenburg in the western part of berlin and the scholatenberg city hall this was the first time i noticed this had an even more nazi looking eagle above the door i mean it was the one with the sort of like wings out to the side like the like the luftwaffe and it had been clear very clear that somebody had just chiseled off the like the the talons were there but they weren't holding anything um but the point was trying to be made that they were trying to sort of extirpate nazism out of german society and they uh so you would have to fill out this questionnaire the fragabogen uh and then they would sort of investigate you to see what kind of person you had been and you could get this is a what's called an atlas zoidness a clearance certificate showing that uh paul fisher uh of uh number two graf adolf strasse in vatencheit had been investigated and had been found had been cleared under the practices of uh under the provisions of the military government ordinance number 79 which is the denotification ordinance uh and this was sometimes referred to as so uh there's a there's a very popular soap brand both in germany and that's what elsewhere called paracel this was often referred to as a personal shine like a a certificate of cleanliness this is i wish you could see this better but i'm just going to explain what it is this is a cartoon that appeared in the german newspaper in 1946 and what you see is um it says uh repentance of the sinner uh was the cause of more joy than the uh than the the ten uh just men there's a line from the bible which are all i'm sure aware um so what we have is black sheep going in here coming into the what's you you kind of can't see but it says nazificator the denotsifier they go down through this machine and they come down as little white sheep out here um this is a pennant it's got you kind of can't see it but it's got the symbol of bavaria on it bavaria was the kind of homeland of the nazis and uh there was a kind of jaundiced feeling about the uh about denotification in west germany they really felt like it was very uneven now there's an interesting difference in east germany so many of you will be familiar with uh the diaries of victor klemper victor klemper was a professor at the technical university of of dresden uh he was a jew his wife was quote unquote aryan and uh so he was not deported if you were mayor if you were a jewish person who's married to a non-jew they wouldn't in germany outside of germany was different but in germany they wouldn't deport you now you had to live under very brutal conditions they kept getting visited by a pair of ss men who they nicknamed hitter and spitter um but uh klemperer kept a diary of the whole thing very famously and it's really if you're interested in what daily life was like in national socialism and it's also i i think klemper's diaries are just worth reading as a sort of statement of kind of human will to persist under under horrific conditions um anyway so he went to the east he was not a communist he was a german nationalist but he went to the east after the war and the reason was this the germans came in the russians came into the german east the educational institutions in the eastern in the russian zone of patrol and said you're all fired uh any of you who can prove that you were not nazis can have a job and we'd love to have you but if you can't you're out that's it uh whereas in the west some people got had problems the philosopher martin heidegger who had been who had sort of trying to been kind of like fashioning himself as kind of intellectual leader of philosophical leader of german of national socialism in the mid-30s when he was the rector of the university of freiburg but kind of fallen out with them he then lost his teaching credential but a lot of people who had been associated with the nazis didn't or only lost it for a little while and then got it again because once again the allies had decided that the real threat now was the soviets was was russian communism uh and so they were willing to listen to someone come to them and say look you know hitler seemed like an okay guy at the beginning right and and by the time i knew that he wasn't i was you know it was too late um or you know i just joined the party because i because if i didn't i was going to get fired and that by the way is not a totally ridiculous you know uh explanation i mean one of our great mistakes i try not to talk about modern politics but i will say this because i think it's fairly well established one of our great mistakes in iraq was firing all the bath party people because to do anything in iraq you had to be a member of the bath party and there were a lot of people who were a bath were members of the bath party because they wanted a job not because they thought that saddam was a great guy so when you're sort of in the process of like uh pulling apart a totalitarian system or an authoritarian system uh the you know there's some i'm not saying this to defend people who are nazis i have absolutely no sympathy for them but the fact of the matter is in a in a repressive system not every member of the communist party in soviet union was like hey working class is great i mean a lot of them were members of communist party because if you didn't want to be a ditch digger you know that was what you had to do but it also you know if you'd been on the wrong end of national socialism um and all of a sudden you're walking down the street like one of the guys who had been the guy who ran the gas chambers in treblinka i think was at some festival and he ran into one of the like 10 or 15 people who survived treblinka i mean like treblinka almost no one survived but he ran into and apparently the first thing he said to them was how are you still alive but then this person turned them turned him into the police and he uh ended up getting his just desserts but that happened to people you know you would run into these people who during the war you know had uh i mean this was what everyday life was like in national socialism too like there was a lot of score settling so you know your neighbor uh annoyed you for years so you like went to the local police and were like yeah i heard fritz talking about hitler being a jerk you know you could there's a lot of that this is this is what happens in in totalitarian systems uh in december 1948 the u.n passed the genocide convention the term genocide was originated by a lithuanian jurist named rafael lemkin who had been working in the allied military government he wrote a book called axis rule in occupied europe in 1944 where he coined the term the genocide convention is really interesting i could give a whole lecture on that which i won't do but just to say article 2 of the convention defines genocide as any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy in whole or in part a national ethnical racial or religious group as such killing members of the group causing serious bodily or mental harm deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part imposing members intended to prevent births within the group forcibly transferring children of the group to another group and i want you to think hard about some things that might fall under this now there are some problems here like say there's like five native americans in town and i shoot them not to not to justify this repulsive act but just say like if i did it because they're native americans that's genocide right because systematically that's the in part part if i just did it because they owed me money from a poker game it's not um so it gets hard also you know you have the case like in uh in uh cambodia cambodia is often referred to as a genocide it's really politicide because the the people who were doing the exterminating were the same racial ethnical uh national group as the people who are the victims of the genocide um so it's hard to it's hard there's some sort of problems of application the crimes punishable genocide conspiracy to commit genocide direct public incitement commit genocide attempt to commit genocide complicity but so um you'll notice any of you who are sort of paying attention when the when the rwandan genocide was going on nobody in the u.n would use the word genocide if you look in all the u.n discussions the word genocide is never ever used and here's the reason because as soon as something gets labeled genocide then people have to do something and i mean who wants to send troops to the rwanda like where's the upside you know like building up treasures in heaven well you know i guarantee you if you're the president and you're presented with the prospect of having to go to someone's family and say gee mrs so-and-so i'm sorry your son had to die like the reason is like to prevent one group of people who you don't care about from killing another group of people you don't care about that's a hard sell and it's not i'm not saying this is a heartless thing but it's presidents think that way right you know if you're going to go if you're going to ask somebody in the u.s army to make the ultimate sacrifice the last full measure of devotion as as lincoln said you need to come up with something you're going to tell that person's family to justify that sacrifice i mean we i've you know blankly we owe that to the to the to the to the families um so the the people in the u.n absolutely didn't want to talk about that as genocide because if they had then they would have been obliged to actually do something about it which nobody none of them wanted to do there was just once again there's no upside um i'll just finish up by saying uh two things one is this um so after uh the military tribunals the national military the nur the subsequent tribunals there were no more trials and the whole thing nobody wanted to talk about it throughout the 1950s um there were a small number of people who really wanted to thought that some other things needed to be done and one of them was this guy named fritz bauer who was the attorney general for the state of hessa he was the sort of he started building up evidence against people because there had been a there had been a trial of auschwitz people in poland uh in in 1946 that led to uh lots of executions of people who deserved it i think all but two of the people who were tried were then executed um but uh while he was preparing this there was this interesting case uh the case of a fellow named bogdan stashinsky who was a kgb agent who perpetrated a number of murders in west germany and was caught and the the german supreme court decided that he couldn't be held responsible because he had been ordered to do it by a government so then bowen is people like well this is great right we want to try these people who were like serious criminals but we can only try but because they were carrying out the orders of government we can only try them if we know for a fact that they actually did things they themselves did things that were uh that were outside of the realm of those orders um anyway they had they had uh they charged 22 men 18 were convicted one was acquitted three were released for health reasons um but the reason this is interesting is because it's like it shows you a kind of generational change that happened in germany right because the sort of kids who had been say you were like six or seven in 1945 that means you're like 26 or you know 22 and you're starting to ask hey grandpa what did you do during the war and the answers that they were get i mean so this is a time that that that's the kind of sort of nascent period of real student radicalism in germany and one of the reasons was this kind of consciousness that a lot of what had gone on during the nazi period had been really swept under the rug there had really been there was a pretty quick pivot to hey we're all in this anti-communist struggle together and um and once again okay so i don't want to come off and say that's like a completely ridiculous thing right because that you know the nobody in western europe no one wants to live under stalinism who doesn't have to okay i think that's i think something we can all ascent to as a principal and the you know nobody wanted the red army so as a matter of fact when the when the uh when nato was established the british uh representative i think was jack colville said that the purpose of nato was uh to keep the americans in the russians out and the germans down uh and that's there was a real there was a real consciousness that that the soviet union was a was a danger and a danger on a kind of a worldwide scale but so by the time 1963 rolls around you've got a new generation coming of age in germany who've looked at you know they did a they did a they did a survey 1956 uh of the german foreign office and it turned out west german foreign office and it turned out that a greater proportion of them had been card-carrying nazis than in 1940 so like there were all these guys there was a big there was a famous case where uh uh the uh odd now are accepted as a sort of legal official the guy who had written the uh the sort of the the commentaries on how to apply the nuremberg laws um so there was a feeling that kind of a lot of nazism had been kind of swept under the rug and the the auschwitz the frankfurt outfits trial was the kind of beginning in a certain sense of uh an extensive discussion uh one that i think was really helpful in germany because eventually now west germany gave large amounts of money excuse me in terms of reparations to israel many of you will probably know the east germans gave zero and the rationale that they gave for this was well why should we give money to a bunch of capitalists who happen to be jews there's a really sort of nasty anti-semitic undertone to that but but their i their premise was like well i mean the east germans were like we were the victims too right we were communists got victimized by the nazis and the there's a certain sense in which that's not wrong the nazis murdered lots and lots of communists um but if you went to there's a there's a big uh there's a big uh monument in the southern part of berlin called the trump tower park that has all these gigantic murals and statues that the soviets built there and you could be forgiven after going through there for not knowing that any jews had been killed by the nazis i mean really like their narrative was you know we were the anti-fascist fighters so why is it that the nuremberg trials are persistently important well because they were a sort of first and very important step in establishing an idea of international law that allows for the hope if not in fact the practice in every case that people who perpetrate horrific acts will be brought to account now you know certainly this has been imperfect and i mean i think if you look at the history of for instance the serbian trials which just or the the the trials relating to the balkan conflict which just sort of wrapped up uh some people got their just desserts others did not but at least establish the premise and some of the institutions that allow for the bringing of people who commit criminal acts to justice people who commit you know large-scale criminal acts i mean it's one thing like jackson was very adamant too that you know i don't want the guys who are like shooting one or two people right i want the people who were responsible for the mass murdering and uh so i guess in closing i will just say um we can uh if you look if you ask like why is it that we study the holocaust right some people ask some people say well um it's to make sure that it never happens again and if that's the case well we kind of failed like because it's happened like mass murder continues to go on periodically but at least it sort of puts us in a position to try and understand these things and maybe in the long and imperfect history of human development we can take steps not big steps not final steps but each generation taking another step to trying to ensure that uh these kinds of things don't repeat themselves if we can possibly avoid it thank you you

Channel: MentorPublicLib

Views: 47,209

Rating: 4.3990149 out of 5

Keywords: World War II, International Holocaust Remembrance Day, genocide, Nuremberg

Id: KX0NRxo62Vw

Length: 86min 43sec (5203 seconds)

Published: Sun Jan 21 2018